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"A human being should be able to change a
diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a
building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone,
comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone,
solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a
computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
Specialization is for insects." (Robert A. Heinlein)

Saturday, 13 October 2012

Android Development on Netbeans (and the EEEPC)

In my previous
post I moved my first steps in Android development world by
installing Android
SDK and Eclipse IDE on my
desktop computer. After successfully writing my first Android
hello-world I went, almost immediately, on how to do Android
development on the EEEPC 900. If it's true the desktop computer is
much more suited for writing code it's the EEEPC tho one I always
bring with me and I use for my experiments.

I'm a big fan of Eclipse and I use it everyday at
work but, when it comes using it on a netbook, it performs very
poorly. Worst of all some Eclipse configuration windows are too big
to fit into the small EEEPC screen and even lack of scroll-bars. This
is why I use Netbeans on the
EEEPC. After a brief looking-up on the 'net I came to NBAnroid
plug-in page.

Installing Netbeans to 7.2

Even if it isn't
required I decided to upgrade my Netbeans installation to the latest
7.2 version. I so removed previous version by launching Netbeans
removal script

sudo
/usr/local/netbeans-7.1.2/uninstall.sh

then I downloaded latest
Netbeans version from its download
page and launched the auto-installing script

I installed then the
NBAndroid plug-in from Netbean's plug-in manager:

I selected the “Add
...” button in the “Settings” tab and went into the update
center customizer

where I did set the
plug-in update URL (plug-in for older Netbeans versions has a different URL).

Then I selected
“Android” from the available updates

by pressing
“Install” the plug-in installation wizard started, NBAndroid has
a dependency with the Android-Lint plug-in

after the usual
License agreement and a warning about the plug-in being signed from a
not-trusted certificate the installation completes. I then set the
Android SDK path in Netbeans options (in the Miscellaneous/Android
tab)

Then I started the
Android SDK manager (there is a “”Android and AVD Manager” item
in the “Tools” menu)

I then selected
“Android SDK Platform Tools” and “Android 4.1 (API 16)” for
download. Because of the smaller disk space on the EEEPC I've been
able to install only one Android API version. Not a big problem since
the netbook is not going to “production” computer but only one
for experiments. After some more downloading I've been able to write
my first Application.

First Application

I selected
“Android Project” from the “New Project” window and I got the
new Android application window where I cold set basic application
parameters: name, package, activity name and target platform.

After selecting
“Finish” I got my hello-world project ready.

at the beginning I
was a little startled seeing the code marking en error at the line

setContentView(R.layout.main());

looking for it in
the 'net I discovered
that this plug-in, unlike the eclipse one, writes the automatically
generated class “R” only after the first build command. After
pressing the build button the error mark in fact disappeared.

First Run

Like with Eclipse
you can run your Android application just by hitting the run or the
debug button. I tried using a virtual device, after by defining it
with the AVD Manager but it's so painfully slow to load. So running
an application on a real device is the only viable solution on low
performances computers like the EEEPC. After editing the
“51.android.rules” file just like in my previous post the new
hello-world application has been regularly deployed to my phone.